At Franklin schools, elementary school students are already getting acquainted with advanced technology.
After school, staff at Sylvan Learning, a tutoring agency which provides services to Franklin schools, teach students to drag and drop pretexted code to direct robots, which Sylvan Director Shawn Sullivan hopes will mark the beginning of a love of robotics, programming and technology.
Elementary school robotics, middle school coding and high school engineering and computer science classes are among the programs getting a boost with a $30,000 grant from the Elba L. and Gene Portteus Branigin Foundation, according to a news release from the Franklin Education Connection and Franklin schools.
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The grant will allocate $19,800 to pay Sylvan staff, Franklin Education Connection Executive Director Toni Breeden said.
The grant will also provide $9,884 to expand Project Lead the Way classes, Breeden said. Through Project Lead the Way, high school students take elective classes specializing in STEM.
The Franklin Education Connection, which offers education grants to Franklin schools, has awarded $113,136 to the district since 2011, according to the release. The connection received its first grant from the Branigin Foundation in 2015. Last year, the foundation awarded $25,000 to the education foundation, which was also used for STEM.
While elementary school students will program robots with simplified programming commands, students at Custer Baker Intermediate School will learn to create video games using a Javascript program. Beginning in the fall, students at Franklin Community Middle School will learn to type code themselves, Moore said.
“It’s a very generous grant from the Branigin Foundation,” Moore said. “None of this would be possible without the grant.
“For robotics, it’s a six-week course one hour, once a week. At the intermediate level, it’s video game coding. They generate a software license that allows them to modify a video game we teach them to program. They own that game forever.”
Students at the elementary level not only program robots, but use the “We Do Lego” system to build them, Moore said. Although the programming is simplified, putting it together still requires the logic that they will need to use when they get into higher-level coding.
When students are able to grow attached to concepts of coding and programming from an early age, it is easier to continue that into adulthood than for someone who starts to learn later on in life, Sullivan said.
“Hopefully (it will) instill a love or at least a knowledge of robotics and programming and STEM in general,” Sullivan said. “It’s the way of the world now and the way of the world in the future. Preparing students with the joy and love of going further with this if they choose to as they get older. Give them that joy now. They tend to learn quicker than we do as adults.”
